If your content matters to you, especially content on your WordPress site, then please take a few moments to back it up.  It’s much like your backup of your hard drive.  You wouldn’t pass on that, don’t pass on this. Work it into your morning routine.

You’ll need complete backups in order to restore with confidence.  How do you do this?

First, backup your content by exporting it from WordPress.  Like so.

It really does take 60 seconds.  If you really don’t have 60 seconds a week to think about this, hire me.   At least do it weekly, if you blog more often, daily.

Second, backup the database.  You can do this three ways.

The easy way is to install WP DB Backup and set the plugin up to email you weekly or daily versions of your database. I have mine set to weekly, both emailed to me and stored on the server.

Alternatively for plugins you can set up Automatic WordPress Backup which back everything up to an Amazon S3 server offsite.  It’s a little more complicated to set up but I’m beginning to think worth it given the recent rash of hacks with malware.

If you want to do it manually, it’s pretty easy to do that too.  Just follow the instructions straight from WordPress.

It doesn’t matter HOW you do it, so much as you do it and do it right.  Or at the very least get your assistant or web developer to ensure that it’s being done.  It’ll save you time, money and a massive headache if your site is ever infected with malware.

How short are your subject lines?  Do you find the majority of your customers are reading your email newsletters on their mobile devices?

In January this year, PEW released a report on Internet, broadband, and cell phone statistics stating that they “…found that 83% of adults have cell phones or smartphones”.  With mobile use increasing and Apple’s iPad release this year, it’s important to be as concise as you can when sending emails and especially, newsletters. If you’re like me on the go, your attention goes to the most compelling things in your inbox, the rest gets ignored and then archived if it’s not important.

Blue Sky Factory often talks about telling your customers what to expect in your email marketing.  In this mobile world, it is incredibly important.  If you’re attempting to reach your customers with a special offer or want them to act, tell them what they’re going to get by opening your email.  Forget 140 characters.  You now need to do this in 5 words or less.

In this Android screenshot, you can see that email subject lines trunicate at 5 or 6 words.  Doing some research I found the same is true for both the iPhone and the iPad.

To find where your customers are reading your emails and determine if this affects your strategy, go to Google Analytics (you DO have Google Analytics right?) browse to Visitors -> Mobile -> Mobile Devices.  Make sure you check out their screen sizes too to see what the majority of the devices are showing, you can do that at Visitors -> Browser Capabilities -> Screen Resolutions.

Screen Resolutions

Mobile Devices

It’s time to be increasingly thoughtful about mobile marketing given the growing trends.  Give people a compelling reason to read your email when they’re on the go and make sure it’s easy also for them to follow through on your call to action via their mobile device.  If not, then it better be compelling enough for them to leave it in their inbox for when they return to their computer vs archiving right away.

There’s a lot to say for practice, but at some point we have to jump out of the plane or into the deep end.  We cling to the safety blanket of what it is, instead of doing the things that would get us to the place we envision in our minds.  This applies to all areas of life: saying no, learning martial arts, taking downtime, working on our own content, taking a leap from our day job, jumping on the speaking bandwagon, or writing a book.

There is one major goal that applies to small businesses marketing online: make more delighted customers.  Reputation and word of mouth are kings.

If you’re a business owner, you probably have a website and/or are involved in social networking. There are many great ways to learn more about how to improve your efforts and meet your goals.  Often time is spent doing research, attending genius webinars, reading brilliant blogs, watching videos, listening to podcasts, and downloading ebooks.  Of course you want to learn from others who have done a remarkable job.

But now it’s time to get to work with the knowledge that you’ve accumulated.

Here are 6 things you can do right now to make a difference in your marketing efforts online:

1. Tell your story. Why are you so different from every Tom, Dick and Jane, Inc.?  Customers want to know what makes you different, what makes you tick.  If you don’t know the story, how can you market it?  Freshbooks does a brilliant job with sharing their story and they stand out from other invoicing companies as a result.

2. Test. Test everything. Click on things.  I promise that button won’t make things explode.  Maybe.  Test links, test to see how the website looks in different browsers, test the forms, and when you get everything right, dig into A/B testing to see what makes visitors happier.

(Editor disclaimer: if you click the button that does make something explode, I’m in no way responsible for your failure to read.)

3. Make it easy. Every business has a call to action.  You want to sell something, raise money, raise awareness, or share information.  Help me find it when I land on your page.  Help your visitors find it.  Easily.  Big, red (not literally) and loud works.  A site can be pretty and loud at the same time.

4. Think locally. Online marketing is a fabulous thing, but local groups, meetups, networking and other events can help you get to know people around town and boost your business.  Target the local market with Google Places, find a way to share special deals with people in your neighborhood.  Even if your business is virtual, you can still find local customers.

5. Work on your inbound links. The first step in this is creating valuable content that others will want to share with their network. This again goes back to sharing knowledge, but make sure you’re doing it in keyword rich phrases.  Think of it as online word of mouth marketing.

6. Be extraordinary. As Chris Brogan says, if you can’t be extraordinary, be helpful.  Do the unexpected.  Send a customer flowers when their date cancels.  Monitor social channels and reach out if you have knowledge that will help.  Offer them a reward just for being your customer.  When you’re extraordinary, it makes you sticky.  Sticky in a world full of businesses in your niches is good, yes?

It’s now time to stop thinking and start doing.  Stalling runs the risk of the knowledge becoming stale before you have a chance to implement. Learn more and expand your understanding of how to build a better business through online marketing.  Then share it with the rest of us.

What other advice would you give small businesses?

Huge Dropbox fan here, it makes sharing big files super easy which is great, especially for workshifting.  I wanted to share a tip with everyone on how to email files as attachments that you want to share with others via Dropbox.

First, if you don’t have Dropbox, get an account now. (Referral link!)  If you haven’t heard of Dropbox, it allows you to sync your files online and across computers.  It also allows you to share the folders that you create with others, see their changes and offers mobile support for phones and the iPad.  Check it out, you’ll love the ease of file transfers and collaboration opportunities.

Then go over to http://gethabilis.com.  You’ll need to authorize Habilis to connect with your Dropbox account via API, but it only takes a second.

Refresh the http://gethabilis.com page and you’ll see a handy email for adding to your address book.  I added mine to my Google contacts as Dropbox Files.

That’s it! Now you can enjoy sending files to your Dropbox via email if you can’t access the public folder on any device for some reason or another.

Do you know of any other cool Dropbox hacks?  I use it daily and I know others who do as well so share, please!

Some of you know I’m a huge fan of black lab and often my tweet contain their lyrics.  I have a million favorite songs so pointing you at one album would be difficult at best. Buy all of them instead and then watch all the videos.

Their music along with Matthew Ebel’s make up the vast majority of my music collection.

A few months ago, they decided to make a video of their community with photos of the people within it.  They put out a quick call for photos from the community to feature in a video of pictures of people (lyrics are at the bottom of the post).  Of course, I immediately jumped on the bandwagon and sent one over. I never expected to make it in so thanks guys.

Their community is within and watching the video gives a small glimpse of all the people loving their music. It’s very touching.  A simple act and it brought people closer to the music they love.

Pictures Of People from Black Lab on Vimeo.

pictures of people well nothing gets done. and everyone’s tired. yeah but everything’s fine. everything comes in it’s own good time. pictures of people in magazines. I think they’re trying to tell me something. pictures of people I’ve never met living inside my tv set. and my heart gets so full driving around this town. feel like dr. zhivago lost in chicago. these pictures of people never alone or confused just looking for something left at the side of the road. these pictures of people I never talk to. I wanna say ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’ these pictures of people I could believe in if there was a way I could touch and feel them. and I’ll never see the same again. no I’ll never see the same again. and everything gets quiet. I need help to remember. and I feel no regret for the kindness of strangers come down through the airwaves. never alone or afraid just searching for something left at the side of the road. pictures of people. people around me never run out of things to tell me. these pictures of people here in my mind. I carry them with me all of the time. and I’ll never see the same again. what’s left of you my friend. how can I miss you? I’ve never met you. pictures of people.

59 days and counting.

The video below is a TED talk by Rob Hopkins on “Transition to a world without Oil“, who reminds us that the time period in which we’ve developed and build our lives around oil dependency is very short and will very shortly come to an end.  He touches on how oil production has dwindled as well as the energy we get from oil now vs. the 1930s.

“The world isn’t Second Life. We can’t create new land and new energy systems at the click of a mouse.”

Rob founded the Transition movement, helping communities take the steps to creatively come up with new ideas on sustainability now, before our world changes and we must change with it.  Interestingly, one town has created their own currency as a result that is only worth something within the town but inspires local spending and growth.  (As he talks about stories it reminds me muchly of Ron Ploof.)

Will we be able to give up the status and ease of life that we so effectively build on this energy source to embrace a new way of living before we meet a future without oil?  That’s the question that we ultimately need to answer.  This problem isn’t going away.

Think about the ways you can change your world, your community.  It’s a topic on my mind this evening as we ready for Podcamp Boston 5 and this year’s theme Preparing for the Future.

What can you do to creatively change the way you live a little at a time to meet the future transition and prevent disasters like the oil spill from ever occurring again?

When doing business online, one of your first priorities is to make it dead easy to buy.  It is the responsibility of a business to provide a flawless experience online for customers when they get into the sales process.  The goal of every business should be to convert the sale, yes?

As an assistant, I spend a lot of my time managing speaking information, travel schedules and flight/hotel bookings for clients.  For example, booking a hotel should be dead easy.  It takes at most 3-5 minutes (unless they need a convoluted amount of information).

If a site fails me at that moment I click that button to pay, it marks my day.  I now have to call you to book a room and this irritates me because you are wasting my time.  Please don’t.

If you are doing business online, check your processes.  Go through each scenario as if you are a customer and make sure you are providing the best experience possible.  Test the products, forms, buttons, and confirmations.  Then, test it again and then have others test it to get different perspectives.

Make it easy for your customers to get what they want from you. At the end of the day if you make their lives easier you’re more likely to get a repeat customer and recommendations to try your products and services.

We need to get started on Facebook, start tweeting about our business, stick social media icons on our pages, get social and maybe that will save our business.

Recently, I’ve been given the opportunity to learn boxing at the hands of Mark Davis of Boston Martial Arts Center. It’s the last sport I thought I’d jump into, excited to learn, and it’s been helpful in terms of learning about focus and reaction.

There’s obviously a lot of training involved before entering any kind of ring, but one of the things boxing teaches is to look beyond the moment and at what’s going to happen next.

In boxing, you “gather information” by watching your competitors moves. You can “see” when and where the next punch is if you learn to read in between the lines and adjustments of the body. Reading such is referred to in sports terms as telegraphing.

Reading telegraphs in boxing is an art form, a sign of being an expert. Pros spend thousands of hours learning how to read body language and part of the reason they win in the ring is their ability to read those signs and act on them effectively inside a split second.

How can you win at reading telegraphs in marketing to determine competitors next moves?

With the wealth of information being spread about in social media, our thoughts often turn to how we can share content using these tools and to engage with others in our area of expertise as it were.

How many times you heard about or seen a company set up Twitter searches, Tweetdeck listening panes, LinkedIN groups, or Facebook fan pages only to leave them to broken windows?

What’s often left untapped is the ability to use the tools to gather information on what companies, especially competitors, will do next.

However, the real value is going beyond gathering information and analyzing it to figure out the best strategy for a counter against your competition. To provide actionable insights on what’s next for your company.

People sometimes put the filters in place but aren’t sure what to do with the information or are too narrowly focused on their own company’s reputation to look beyond and see what the next moves are being telegraphed from competitors.  Once you learn to read the signs, then you can begin to plot your next moves.

(There are some GREAT paid tools for tracking out there. I won’t mention a wealth of them but I will point you to a blog post on 8 Competitive Intelligence Data Sources by Avinash Kaushik. Also, Chris Penn build a listening dashboard to mimic Bloomberg on iGoogle which is a good example of how you can use iGoogle for absolutely free.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking that once the tools are setup that you’re finished. Someone in your company will need to contribute time daily to sort through the information to find the telegraphs.)

What are you doing to sort through the information that you’re monitoring and how has it helped you make some strategic decisions on what your company’s next best move is?

(A word of caution: All of this assumes that your company has it’s house in order. Goals plotted, departments working together and customers happy. None of this will help if your company is failing at being organized and keeping it’s customers.)

I’m dropping some great links here that I’ve come across this past week.  List is by no means complete but every post on this list is worth your time to check out.  Wait, no, don’t just check out the post…subscribe to these blogs if you aren’t already.  You’ll always be learning something.

Thanks to the great bloggers in this list.

Ron Ploof – C Level Social Media Ignorance

Greg Cangialosi – The Marketers “New Normal”

Justin Kownacki – Why I Need You to be a Better Audience

Mack Collier – The ROI of Giving a Damn

Christopher S. Penn – Three Nearly Guaranteed Moneymaking Twitter Words

DJ Waldow – Silent Bob & Southwest Airlines: 7 Lessons Learned